AHRQ National Guideline Clearinghouse shutting down

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has announced that after July 16, 2018, its National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) website (guideline.gov) will no longer be available because its federal funding will be discontinued. According to the NGC website, its mission is to provide “an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation, and use.”

Its services, all free to use, included providing summaries of each guideline, side-by-side comparisons of two or more guidelines, and syntheses of guidelines covering similar topics, highlighting areas of similarity and difference.

Update, July 17, 2018: Now that the guidelines are no longer available on the government site, ECRI Institute, the independent nonprofit that developed and maintained the National Guidelines Clearinghouse since its inception 20 years ago, “announced plans to continue providing this critical service to the healthcare community.” The ECRI Institute stated that they will launch an interim website this Fall “with many additional features planned for the near future.” Participating guideline developers will be able to access and contribute to the website free of charge, according to the company, while others will be charged a fee. In addition, as a temporary stop-gap, Fred Trotter, founder and CTO of CareSet Systems, a Medicare data use site, voluntarily cloned the complete guidelines before the government site shut down and made them available for public use here: https://github.com/CareSet/AHRQ_search_clone.